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Intel's new NPU will juggle more than 100 connected devices in your smart home

By Vijay Anand - on 1 Jun 2016, 9:20am

New Intel NPU to power next-gen home gateways and access points to serve over 100 devices per home

By 2020, Intel is estimating that there will be over 50 billion connected devices on the planet. As staggering as that sounds, it’s probably a conservative estimate when you consider how many connected devices and services there are in a modern smart home. Just a quick check with your home router in your family will reveal several smartphones, smart TVs, streaming service boxes, wireless speakers, home automation devices and the list will go on and on.

Based on the dual-core Intel Atom microarchitecture, the Intel AnyWAN GRX750 is a new high performance, low power broadband and communications processor SoC that will enable service providers and OEMs to deliver new home gateways and network access points for the highly connected smart homes of today and the future.

Meet the new Intel AnyWAN GRX750 SoC home gateway NPU that will bring the scalability Intel's architecture and its wide variety of network interfaces to the designers of next-gen home gateway products of your smart home.

Here are some of the highlights of this network processing unit (NPU), followed by its block diagram:-

  • Embedded 14nm dual-core x86/64 Intel Atom processor (up to 2.5GHz clock)
  • 32 and 64-bit processing
  • 10Gbit packet processor for high speed routing
  • 100MB/sec NAS performance
  • Intel AnyWAN connectivity architecture: On-board or SFP or both simultaneously
  • All Intel NPU, E-PHY, PON, G.fast, Wi-Fi, Femto, DECT, SLIC
  • IOT-scalable Wi-Fi through DirectConnect for seamless connection with NPU
  • Universal GateWay Software (UGW)
  • Great tools, great community: Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), McAfee Intrusion Prevention System, and DPI security
  • 6W thermal design power

A block diagram of the Intel NPU.

Complimenting it is Intel’s new XWAY WAV500 Wi-Fi chipsets, Intel’s 5th generation of 802.11ac family of Wi-Fi products, now with MU-MIMO capability to truly support multiple concurrent clients.

By building an all-Intel powered solution that combines the Intel AnyWan GRX750 SoC NPU and XWAY WAV500 series of Wi-Fi chipsets, Intel’s aim is to enable consumers to support more than 100 connected devices in the home with more than 1Gbps of network traffic.

To realize this dream sooner, Intel is working with a wide variety of OEMs and ODMs - Arris, ASUS, AVM, Belkin, Foxconn, Haier, Hitron, Humax, Mitrastar, Netcore, Netgear, NewOne, VTech and Zyxel - to deliver broadband gateway and Wi-Fi access points based on two development kits to speed-up time-to-market. This will not be an Intel-branded product, but rather, an Intel-inside product.

Soon, you’ll have “Intel-inside” in network gateways and access points. No specific date and availability details were shared at this point of time, but expect to see the respective OEMs and ODMs make announcements later in the year.

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